Show: The Handmaid’s Tale

Plot Overview

The Handmaid’s Tale is based on the novel with the same name by Margaret Atwood, and is a story set in a near-future totalitarian theocracy, where population is facing dangerously low reproduction rates, and in which women’s rights were taken away and society was reorganized along a hierarchical regime inspired by religious fanaticism.

Handmaids are fertile women assigned to men of the ruling class (Commanders) to bear children. They have no freedom, are routinely raped by their Commanders as part of the “Ceremony” and are forbidden to read. Marthas are older, infertile women who are used as servants.

Homosexuality

Homosexuality is punishable by death and referred to as “gender treachery”, although if women are also fertile, they are “sentenced to redemption” because “God has seen fit to make you fruitful, and by that we are bound”, and (re-)assigned as handmaids.

First Season

Last Season

Seasons

Show Tropes

Quotes

The Hollywood Reporter: Is Ofsteven suicidal when she jumps into that car?

I wouldn’t say suicidal, I’d say homicidal. Take your shot, take out your anger for real, don’t let them grind you down. Offred said she looked invincible, which is so great because it’s like she’s not suicidal, she’s invincible. It’s a little bit different. She’s not trying to die. She may end up going out in a blaze of glory, but it’s the blaze of glory she’s thinking about.

The Hollywood Reporter: The Bury Your Gays trope went mainstream in the past year. How is Handmaid’s working to ensure that it doesn’t perpetrate that?

The show looks at all of the characters as 100 percent multidimensional characters. We don’t have anyone on our show that is the “gay character.” Ofglen is so much more than that. Moira is so much more than that. We’re not trying to kill anyone; we’re trying to show the realities of what can happen to anyone that is marginalized in this society. Anyone who is seen as other, anyone who has any fact or part of them that does not go with the regime. I would challenge anyone and encourage anyone who is of that line of thinking to look at the story as much more than that.

On this show, “kill your anything” is probably up for grabs. My decision about making characters straight or gay really is much more dependent on the way that people in my life are. I don’t try to think that much beyond that. I wasn’t thinking of the sexual orientation of people as the first thing you find out about them; their identity is their identity in full.

[…]

That’s just who they are. I tried to create characters and then have them be in a position to have logical fates for those characters. Gilead and The Handmaid’s Tale operates outside those rules because in that world, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. So the “kill your gays” policy is institutional in the series. You’re operating on a different lane than that conversation.